It has been reported that the alleged descent to FL120 never occurred.

Vastly different circumstances, the pilots were able to talk to ATC and flight ended very quickly (minutes), not flying for 7 hrs across oceans and making funny turns avoiding airspaces.

well, there is almost a proof.
They had fuel for 7:30 hrs and the flight lasted over 7 hrs.
In view of the above it is you who has to prove there was no fuel exhaustion.

Gouli ... . If someone was alive in the cabin then the portable ELT's would have been activated.

RAAF confirming here this morning that they have now found debris from the aircraft, sadly no survivors.

And your sources are ...??

By whom? Someone who knew they were there, and how to operate them? A random passenger, perhaps?
"Someone doth protest too much, methinks"

Now back to credible News.

Has it hit the media yet?

BEA on the search for AFR447
 

The following conclusions reached by the BEA after its search for AFR447 may be of interest:

This latest announcement makes zero sense to me physically. The talk about Doppler effect looks like techno-gibberish that makes me wonder what exactly they are hiding and why.

We have a radially symmetric configuration. One satellite in geosynchronous orbit, approximately round Earth, and an aircraft somewhere above the Earth. We can measure the distance from the satellite to the aircraft via time-of-flight, and we can measure the radial speed of the aircraft via Doppler effect, but nothing here breaks either the rotational symmetry or mirror symmetry.

RAAF cannot confirm debris is from MH370 by visual means alone. Need debris in hand to confirm.

Already posted that they said they went back through weeks of other Malaysian 777 flights they had data for and examined the signal for those going northbound compared to the southbound ones and saw a Doppler shift (I guess?). So they're making a comparison not looking at MH370 alone.

similarly no talk of "jitters" I read in another thread.

:cool:

FWIW, here is a little more detail on what the RAAF saw as reported be the pilot (per Xinhua):


RAAF says mutiple objects "verified", mission deemed "successful" - Xinhua | English.news.cn

Lonewolf 50

According to latest on our side of the pond is the Malaysian PM`s announcement, compassionate and commiserating in nature rather than hard facts. The RAAF P3 crew have reported floating objects which appear to be a crate and belts. So nothing concrete as yet.
Good chance by early tomorrow the reported debris may be recovered by vessels in the area and promptly identified.

Satellite sees a Doppler shift when the aircraft is on a trajectory that brings it closer or further away from it. E.g., if the satellite is 45 degrees above the horizon from the point of view of the aircraft and the aircraft flies at 490 knots and steady altitude directly towards the satellite, and communications between the satellite and the aircraft occur at the frequency of 1.6 GHz, Doppler shift is 1.6e9*cos(45)*(490*1.852/3600)/299792=1903 Hz.

If the same aircraft were to turn either X degrees left or X degrees right, radial speed (the component directed towards the satellite) would decrease, transverse speed would increase, and Doppler shift would decrease. But, since the system has mirror symmetry, the satellite has no way of knowing whether the aircraft turned left or right.

Like I said, we have a highly symmetric configuration (one satellite) and nothing evident to break the symmetry.

hamster3null Different surfaces north and south: land and ocean?

I thought Chris McLaughlin of INMARSAT certainly had a dig at MAS this evening for being one of the airlines who choose not to follow the AF447 BEA recommendation 4.2.4 relating to transmission of flight data and who are now suffering the consequences of such inaction.

Hamster,
Supposing the orbit of the satellite were ever so slightly inclined to the equator. Then the satellite would appear to nutate North and South of the equator as viewed from earth and would create slight doppler effects at certain times of the day for stations essentially North and South of the satellite. Gotta be something like that.

I have just listened to the BBC interview of a person from INMARSAT. If I understood correctly
1) they did create and provide a model of the likely "disappearance" zone about a week ago i.e. over a week after the event, based on analysis of pings and modelling of typical MH flights. Congratulations for the initiative to what is in principle a data-transmission organisation.
2) as search organisations did then go to the area, it is also logical that the Malaysians would want to also remain focussed on other scenarios until they had been rendered impossible. Had they not done so and had the Inmarsat model have subsequently been proved wrong would have been unfortunate.
If I add to that
3) as far as I have been able to ascertain, there is no firm evidence of what happened inside the plane after the last voice exchange
4) likewise there is little evidence of where it actually then flew and even less on how it got onto the track it seems to have followed, or for that matter any other possible tracks
I find the statement emanating from the Beijing family group very unfortunate and possibly due to a lack of counselling and understanding of the bigger picture. It is imperative that the industry works to communicate on why it takes time and thus avoid such happenings. That said, I have to admit that the comment of the Inmarsat responsible that, by obligation, ships are tracked every 6 hours and that a similar tracking could be instituted for aircraft blew me over, not by its simplicity, but by the fact that say ICAO has not mandated it. I hope they will see the value. We don't need another one like this.

Perhaps there's an air temperature or humidity difference between the N & S arcs that would make differentiation possible? Land & sea and all that? I appreciate the altitude involved here.

So are you saying if you compare the Doppler shift in MH370's pings, over a 7hr flight on a SSW track, with flights flying in some opposite direction, would there be no difference whatsoever ?